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Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History

 
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Davida Siwisa James: Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill

Christopher Bell: Walking East Harlem

Interviewed by Rob Snyder

Davida Siwisa James explores two parts of Harlem in her book Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill: Alexander Hamilton’s Old Harlem Neighborhood Through the Centuries, published by the Empire State Editions imprint of Fordham University Press. Exploring four centuries of life in a part of upper Manhattan that stretches from 135th Street to 165th Street and from Edgecombe Avenue to the Hudson River, James looks at the encounters between the Lenape and Dutch settlers, the rural village that was Harlem, and the Harlem Renaissance luminaries who lived in Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill.

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Which Way to the Promised Land? Mabel Lee at the Intersection of Gender and Race

Which Way to the Promised Land? Mabel Lee at the Intersection of Gender and Race

By Mimi Yang

Oppressed people across cultures embrace the Exodus narrative, in which Moses delivers the Israelites from slavery, as a source of hope and strength. “The Promised Land” has become more than a physical locale for modern-day seekers; it represents a cultural and spiritual sphere that offers freedom, equality, and fulfillment. Mabel Ping Hua Lee (李彬华1896 – 1966), a Chinese feminist whose work and commitment was on par with her contemporary suffragists, also sought the Promised Land — a place for a better life and dreams for happiness and fulfillment. New York City entered Lee’s life as the gate, the world, and the destiny of her Promised Land. Intriguingly, her feminism and dedication to securing the universal right to vote originated from a seemingly distant cultural background.

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Quarantine Scenes in Staten Island History

Quarantine Scenes in Staten Island History

By Carlos Santiago

New York City’s borough of Staten Island has a long history of quarantines and public reactions to them. Just over five miles from Manhattan, Staten Island has faced numerous disease outbreaks, with quarantine measures playing a central role in containment efforts. In the nineteenth century, mass immigration and the spread of infectious diseases overwhelmed the city, leading to stricter quarantine enforcement.

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Dawn Day Biehler: Animating Central Park

Animating Central Park: A Multispecies History

By Dawn Day Biehler

I chose to investigate Central Park mostly because its architecture and architects heavily influenced other parks across the US. My choice of Central Park was also motivated by my experience growing up in upstate New York. I was concerned about the relationship between New York City and its suburban and rural hinterlands – both the cultural meanings of city and countryside, and how the city exploited more land, water, plant and animal life, and human labor as it grew.

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African Americans and Real Estate in Queens in the 1920s

African Americans and Real Estate in Queens in the 1920s

By Lawrence Samuel

In 1922, a milestone was reached when the reportedly last remaining large tract of farmland was divided into 1,500 lots that were then placed on the market as Forest Hills West. “Farm after farm, large as well as small, has been taken in the revolutionary movement that has changed Queens from New York’s vegetable garden to a great expanse of small homes, flats, factories, and building sites,” the New York Herald Tribune noted. Anticipating the arrival (and departure) of commuters, the LIRR was starting train service to Forest Hills West. Not far away, plans were in the works to widen Queens Boulevard to two hundred feet, as merchants and tradesmen believed it was the avenue best suited for retail business in the borough.

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Fluoride in the Water and the Paranoid Style in New York City Politics

Fluoride in the Water and the Paranoid Style in New York City Politics

By Matthew Vaz

Fluoride has once again emerged as a matter of public controversy since a federal judge, in October of 2024, ordered the EPA to conduct a risk assessment on the effects of fluoride in the water. The issue has been further enlivened by indications that the incoming presidential administration may support ending fluoridation of water. Little remembered is the heated and drawn-out controversy that brought fluoride to the water supply of New York City. Richard Hofstadter, who lived and worked in New York all through the contentious debate, undoubtedly must have had some of his fellow New Yorkers in mind.

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Judy: A Magazine, Greenwich Village, 1919

Judy: A Magazine, Greenwich Village, 1919

By Karen Leick

Sadly, Judy did not grow older and develop into a more culturally significant and financially stable feminist voice. The goal was original: these women were familiar with the gendered expectations of the many periodicals where they regularly published – from radical magazines like the Masses to the conventional Ladies’ Home Journal. Although there were influential women editors at the time (Harriet Monroe, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, to name a few), no other publication promised to disrupt the status quo in order to present the candid perspective of women. Even if Judy did not have long-term success, the youthful ambition of these women led them to a variety of creative accomplishments and careers in film, radio, the visual arts, journalism, and literature; these media provided other venues for them to privilege the perspective of women.

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Reading from Left to Left: Radical Bookstores in NYC, 1930-2000s

Reading from Left to Left: Radical Bookstores in NYC, 1930-2000s

By Shannon O’Neill

As pivotal spaces for leftists to strategize and engage one another, political party bookstores were key in supporting the labor movement, pushing for racial equality, working on behalf of revolutionary freedom fighters, and participating in global solidarity and struggle. In doing so, they created the space for their customers to not only radically reimagine their worlds, but to participate in activating their radical imaginations.

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Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: The Cities We Need

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: The Cities We Need

Interviewed By Katie Uva

The walking tours were the basis for my photography, and my photographs seeded the later interviews I did with my tour guides. Each time someone took me on a tour, I would make note of the everyday places they’d taken me to — and then over the following weeks I would return to each place, remembering the story my tour guide had told me and making a photograph in response to that story. I thought about how those stories might be embedded in a photograph of a place. As a photographer, I like to be still in a place, watch it happen around me and then make a photograph. In some ways, my photography of cities and places is like a still life — though not of grapes on a table. I’m interested in stillness and careful looking —framing, light, and time are the materials of any photograph.

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Some New York Bricks

Some New York Bricks

By Matthew Kilbane

This short essay pairs two poets who relied in their time on the materials of New York City — its brick and mortar, its shatterable glass — in order to test the promise that poetry matters. Naomi Replansky (1918-2023) and June Jordan (1936-2002) each found they could get poems to admit their own possibilities and limitations as forms of action in the world by writing about what shelters New Yorkers, what they can and cannot see through, what goes up in flames or breaks apart, and what endures. Readers of Gotham may be interested in the way this infrastructural imagery draws language back, again and again, to the particularities of New York history. For Replansky and Jordan, poetry’s most salient social meanings emerge from awareness of the city as an inexorably unfinished construction, something poets and their readers — neighbors, whatever their address — must build together.

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